An “enraged letter” from Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul to his editor at Knopf, Sonny Mehta

Copy editors are an essential cog in the wheel of publishing. Despite this, their relationship with the author can sometimes be a strained one. Case in point, this angry letter from Nobel Prize-winning author V.S. Naipaul, which he fired off after receiving his edited manuscript from an apparently overzealous copy editor.

10 May 1988

Dear Sonny,

The copy-edited text of A Turn in the South came yesterday; it is such an appalling piece of work that I feel I have to write about it. This kind of copy-editing gets in the way of creative reading. I spend so much time restoring the text I wrote (and as a result know rather well). I thought it might have been known in the office that after 34 years and 20 books I knew certain things about writing and didn’t want a copy-editor’s help with punctuation or the thing called repetition….

It happens that English – the history of the language – was my subject at Oxford. It happens that I know very well that these so-called “rules” have nothing to do with the language and are really rules about French usage. The glory of English is that it is without these court rules: it is a language made by the people who write it. My name goes on my book. I am responsible for the way the words are put together. It is one reason why I became a writer.

Every writer has his own voice. (Every serious or dedicated writer.) This is achieved by the way he punctuates; the rhythm of his phrases; the way the writing reflects the processes of the writer’s thought: all the nervousness, all the links, all the curious associations. An assiduous copy-editor can undo this very quickly, can make A write like B and Ms C.

And what a waste of spirit it is for the writer, who is in effect re-doing bits of his manuscript all the time instead of giving it a truly creative, revising read. Consider how it has made me sit down this morning, not to my work, but to write this enraged letter.

Yours,

Vidia

(From The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French. Source: Letters of Note)